Q-Post portals will deliver global first

Q-Post, Qatar’s postal service, is examining an ambitious plan to provide information on incoming and outgoing mail to other postal services over an extranet portal. Executives said the implementation of the system will lead to both significant time and cost savings.

Q-Post, Qatar’s postal service, is examining an ambitious plan to provide information on incoming and outgoing mail to other postal services over an extranet portal. Executives said the implementation of the system will lead to both significant time and cost savings. The portal will be one of two Q-Post is planning to create, with the other being an intranet to allow company management better access to financial data. The intranet portal would be fed with financial and postal data from Oracle’s E-Business Suite enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, which has recently been deployed at Q-Post. This integrates 11 of the corporation’s legacy systems into one hub — including the international accounts, human resources (HR) and the network of point-of-sale (PoS) machines in Q-Post’s 28 branches. It hopes to create both portals by the end of this year and is currently in the planning stages having not yet selected an IT vendor for the process. The extranet would be the first of its kind worldwide, Q-Post claimed, and would allow individual postal authorities and services from across the world to access information on incoming and outgoing post to or from Qatar and send or receive documentation online. Currently this is done manually. Ehsan Idrissi, chief of ERP, Q-Post said that being able to access this documentation online will save the organisation time and money. “At the moment, for example, if we receive 50 kilos from the UAE we need to confirm we have received this and we need to send them a form saying how much we’ve received,” he explained. “With the portal it will be instant information that will be available online,” he added. Each postal authority would have access to their own portal containing information about consignments of mail sent to and from their own country, Idrissi revealed. The intranet portal that the company plans to create will enable Q-Post’s management to view information on the volume of incoming and outgoing mail being handled by Q-Post and the income being generated by each of the company’s branches. “Using the portal the management will look at the consolidation of accounts with regard to other postal services,” Idrissi said. “They will also be able to look at the volume of mail going between us and other countries,” he added. By looking at information received from the PoS system, Q-Post’s management will be able to see the daily income that has been received from each of its branches. Idrissi said that being able to access this information on the portal would enable senior management to make better informed decisions. “For example, if for marketing purposes we need to market this product much better at this region of the world, we want to see if we need to expand our operations with relation to volume we are receiving in a certain country,” he said. “Before it took three or four days for the management to get access to data on postal and financial statistics. Now there will be just a one day delay between them requesting the information and it being available to them,” he went on to claim. Q-Post has completed the implementation of Oracle Financials — part of the Oracle E-Business suite. The company implemented the Accounts Payable, Accounts Received, General Ledger, Financial Analyser, Cash Management, Purchasing and Payroll modules of E-Business suite. “Q-Post has shown that streamlining back office systems can help the organisation become competitive as they introduce new and improved products to the market,” said Ayman Abouseif, regional director, Oracle Gulf states.